JLINC is a new technology that allows separate systems to interoperate with each other across the Internet by sharing data under automated agreements. JLINC is not a blockchain, or an ICO, but can record an audit trail on any log, ledger or blockchain.

The first commercial implementation of JLINC was designed to give individual people control over their own data under new personal data rights laws in the EU.

JLINC can provide a developer-friendly way to achieve news provenance, a digitally signed chain of custody for information online. That same chain of agreements can support payment models that help restore journalism.‍

The founders of Planetwork have been focused on these issues since 1998, when they started organizing the first small invitational gathering in the San Francisco Presidio.

In May 2000 they convened the first international conference focused on using IT for global ecology. That seminal event in San Francisco spawned the LinkTank, an invitational network made up of over 50 information technology and media professionals, who met for two years in San Francisco and NewYork, and in 2002 commissioned the Augmented Social Network (ASN) whitepaper, presented at the Planetwork conference in 2003.

One of the key insight from the LinkTank Principles was that any truly global network must also be truly decentralized; like Einstein’s universe, its center must be everywhere and nowhere. The LinkTank statement of purpose remains unrealized and more relevant than ever:

We are dedicated to the creation and maintenance of a digital communications platform, operated as a public interest utility, that will strengthen civil society by enabling people to connect, communicate, make transactions, and self-organize in a manner that is consistent with the highest principles of democracy and reflects an enlightened understanding of the fragile beauty of our planet. We will bring together, develop, promote, and hold as a global public commons, software tools and infrastructure that facilitate the emergence, growth, and vitality of networks of individuals and organizations who share ecological and social justice values, as articulated in the Earth Charter

It was much easier to build centralized commercial platforms, and the first to scale dominated and made it impossible for others to challenge them.

When Planetwork originally pitched the ASN idea to major foundations in 2002, they had just embraced open source software, and could not even understand, much less imagine, the idea of an online social network for civil society.

Now, 15 years later, all of the implications that the members of the LinkTank foresaw have come to pass, everyone is familiar with social networks, and increasingly understand the failures of allowing them to be controlled by large commercial platforms.

At the same time, the word 'blockchain' came to represent the very idea of decentralized systems last year, but many have more recently come to understand that additional layers are also needed to build working systems, and that tokenized assets may not actually be the most effective model for building community.

Through it all, Planetwork has continued to focus on the core questions. What are the keys to building distributed systems for online information exchange needed by society, as well as truly effective new models for commence?

In 2015, while working on another project, Victor and Jim realized how to create simple automated Internet data exchange agreements in JavaScript that they called “link contracts”.

JLINC is neither a blockchain nor an ICO, but uses some of the same key innovations in a new way to provide “automated cryptographically signed contracts” that control the exchange and use of data between separate databases at separate domains across the Internet. The JLINC open protocol is held by Planetwork Foundation at JLINC.org.